The present invention relates to communications security, and deals more particularly with dynamically and selectively obfuscating information for multi-party transmission, whereby selected portion(s) of the information can be obfuscated, or obscured, from at least one of the parties receiving the multi-party transmission.
It is becoming prevalent to conduct business and meetings using so-called “voice over IP” (i.e., voice over Internet Protocol, sometimes referred to as “VoIP”) technology. Commonly, a conferencing bridge is provided for establishing and maintaining a conference call with this technology, where each of the participants dials in to this conferencing bridge to participate in the meeting using the conference call. As another approach, participants may communicate using technology whereby multiple audio streams are conferenced together using a Web conferencing offering. (The manner in which such technology enables the conferencing is well known in the art, and accordingly, a detailed discussion thereof is not presented herein.) A significant cost savings may be realized by conducting meetings using conference calls over communication channels in this manner, particularly when the participants are distributed and scattered geographically.
Often, negotiations carried out in this manner lack an aspect of privacy that may be desired by the participants in the conference call meeting. For example, if two different companies have representatives participating in the conference call to negotiate a business contract, and those people are calling in from various locations around the country or even around the world, there may be times during the call when representatives from one of the companies need to exchange thoughts or words that are not appropriate for the other company's representatives to hear—such as proposed adjustments to the price or other terms being negotiated, or perhaps to warn a member of the team that what he is saying is stepping out of line or exceeding his authority or is otherwise inappropriate.